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Welcome to NUS!
Wednesday, May 24, 2006 12:36 PM "So, Zichun, where are you going?" "Oh, I'll be doing Life Sciences in NUS, going to be a teacher... signed a teaching scholarship, you see..." I almost always give this answer, followed by a joke or two about the civil service and 'students nowsaday', when generically asked about my tertiary education. And every time I answer, with a dramatically feigned air of altruistic resignation to a future life of suffering as a teacher, I can't help but suddenly feel a little uneasy. Maybe it is because I've not recieved any official word from neither NUS nor MOE ever since July last year. Maybe it is because many of my friends have started going for their medical check-ups at NUS already, whilst, strangely, I still haven't gotten any shred of news from NUS. Well, in any case, I received a letter from MOE (sent BY HAND via Speedpost no less!) at long last two weeks ago on a Thursday afternoon. In it were various forms, and instructions to start applying for hostel accomodations and all that; stuff that made me feel even more uneasy, as the instructions all appeared to require some form of official liason with NUS. So I started to dig up all the letters pertaining to my tertiary education that I've chucked aside during my busier days in the army, and with a latent sense of dread, I found a yet unopened, official-looking letter from NUS dated Dec '05. I tore it open nervously, and saw two sheets of paper that said 'OAM Form A' and 'OAM Form B'. The thing that caught my eye were the letters printed in bold at the bottom of the letter: 'If you do not reply to us by 11 Jan '06, we will take it that you are rejecting your place in NUS'. I kid you not, cold sweat broke out instantly. I can't imagine how it is that I've not noticed nor remembered seeing this letter for the past 5 months! I experienced this heavy chill in my heart, very much like how I felt that time in the Biology examination hall for Block Test in JC2 when I realised that I didn't know how to do a single question for that exam; I felt like I was really screwed. Then I noticed the OAM Form B (OAM Form A was a matriculation confirmation form) mentioning about the warm and happy family of the ENGINE FACULTY... I had initially applied to Engineering in '04, but because I got offered the MOE scholarship in '05, I had to change my faculty to Science. I vaguely remembered receiving news in July '05 about having had my course of study changed to Science from MOE, though I did not verify with NUS myself. I became very confused. And my cold sweat temporarily evaporated. I convinced myself I must be worrying unduly, and that there must've been a mistake by NUS or something. I sent the MOE scholarship officer a good-humoured email to inquire about this apparent anomaly, and slept soundly at night during the long weekend. So imagine the horror I felt when I found out that the scholarship officer was equally clueless about this issue. She sounded rather concerned, but she was really busy due to all the interviews for this year, and would appreciate very much if I could verify with NUS myself, and report back to her so that she can follow up. I dialed what I deemed to be the relevant contact for NUS, got re-directed a few times, and finally reached the OAM office. After some polite enquiry, and having given my name and NRIC number, it appeared there was no record of me in their database! I panicked. "Oh, so you signed an MOE scholarship and had to change course? Did you reapply to Science this year? No? Oh dear... I think you're supposed to do that, otherwise I don't think you'd have a place in NUS at all..." Cold sweat again. All sorts of ideas started cramming into my head. I started imagining this dark and gloomy scenario of me having to wait another eternity that is one year, under the ridicule of friends and peers and the incessant chiding of my parents and the authorities came into my head. How is it that I have allowed such a terrible freak accident to have occured? By this time, I had more or less descended into a frenzied paranoia. I remembered making my way down to NUS twice last week, digging even more frantically into every single letter I had receieved last year, and calling up either the MOE side or NUS side once every fifteen minutes. I think the most important thing that happened was that I found a letter from NUS dated July '05 saying that they have successfully transfered me from the Engine faculty to the Science faculty. So on the second visit to NUS, with that letter from them as incriminating evidence, I was handed an unsealed envelope, with the freshmen guide, numerous brochures, and the all-important official letter telling me in no uncertain terms that I DO have a place in NUS Science, that is, after they took the letter I produced into their office to process and photocopy. I was still in a daze really when I was handed the envelope. "Uh what's this? So does that mean I do confirm actually really have a place in NUS already?" "Yes that's right." "Huh? Ok, uh, so uh, what actually happened? How is it that I got a letter from your side asking me to confirm my acceptance into the Engine faculty? (And how come I didn't open the letter when I first receieved it in Decemeber last year?)" "I think they forgot to update the system about your change of faculty... but it's settled now, thanks to the letter you brought. (How would I know why you didn't open your letter when you first got it?)" ... Actually, up till now, I'm still not really sure what exactly happened. How did I fail to open such an important letter from NUS for 5 months? Was there a cock-up by NUS? Did I have a place in Science all along, or did I actually crucially corrected an NUS cock-up at the critical moment? I suppose I'd never find out, nor is it really important to do so, come think of it. If you ask me, the most important thing is that, now, when people ask me about my tertiary education, I can answer them with all due irreverence and confidence, without feeling uneasy later on, and waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweat, hallucinating about not being able to find my name on the list during registration into NUS. Well, what a way to get acquainted with NUS... ( 26 comment) Nostalgia Thursday, May 04, 2006 10:26 PM I have a drawer in my room which keeps all the 'sentimentalia' of my life so far; letters and cards that I've recieved from friends, angel mortal messages during JC, rejection letters from girls that I used to like (not kidding, I actually have rejection letters... you see, a simple and amiable 'no' didn't convince me, I had to provoke them till they had to explain what 'no' really meant in concise detail), and many other things which I cannot bear to throw away. And then, when I reached the bottom of my drawer, I found something that caused my heart to leap with joy and nostalgia. Something I thought I've lost forever, because I lost all my soft copy versions of it, and I forgot that I had kept that ONE PRECIOUS hard copy version of it in my drawer. It's none other than our 2L History Drama Script! Yes! That one about the Singapore Police Force!!! Back in Secondary 2, there was this event, involving the 4 'special' schools of our time, called the History Drama. Each school was to come up with a skit (some, like ours, despite being the smallest school among the special four, came up with TWO!) that had to do with any aspect of Singapore History. Then the skits would be judged and three winners would be picked. So, armed with lots of ideas, enthusiasm, and zero experience in stage productions, 25 (or so) of us produced and directed two ten-minute long skits, script, props and all from scratch in 5 months. I forgot how I ended up being the scriptwriter, but I was supposed to write a skit about the brief history of the Singapore Police Force from Raffles' time to now. So I had this crazy idea, and took about 4 months to cough up 4 pages of rhyme. The idea was that the whole skit, narration and dialogue, was to fit seamlessly into the rhythm of the rhyme, without any breaks in between. So after I finished the 4 pages of rhyme, three of us went to a certain President's Scholar's house, and the four of us spent the whole day there coming up with stage directions that would fit the rhyme's structure and rhythm. And then when we finally got down to actually rehearsing, we found out how messy the script really was. We had a hard time trying to synchronise all the stage directions to the rhyme. The actors literally had to run in and out of the stage in order to keep up with the rhyme. And because of the nature of the script, we had like... twenty over different characters (every character had an average screen time of about... 20 seconds), and there were only less than ten of us who were acting. So each person had to play about three to four roles, or more. Luckily for us, we decided to record almost all the narration and dialogue, so all the actors needed to do was to listen for their cue, come in and lip-synch. Every now and then, though, there'd be actual shouting of some lines by the actors on stage. So within a few weeks, we made all the necessary props and managed to somehow turn that mess into a proper skit. With regards to the props, I distinctly remember making this huge palm-shaped (as in our hand, not the plant) styrofoam fly-swatter that Chunsz (who was playing a policeman) used to swing at CK (the thief) in one of the scenes where the lines went 'Transformed the originally crime laden land/ Into a place under the strong and mighty hand/ Of justice, to make it a land of peace/ So that trading and profits will increase'. (Get it? The fly-swatter is supposed to be the Hand of justice!) In the end, because we were one of the last teams to perform the play to the judges on the day itself, the backstage was extremely cluttered and messy by the time it was our turn. We could hardly walk. And that's the real reason why we didn't get first. Nor second. Nor third. Most of us (I believe) from our class will tell you that we would've at least gotten a third or a second if we had started first, because we knew our final rehearsal was better than what we saw from the other schools. We got to perform it again to our own school for the next Monday Assembly, and that performance with the clutter-free backstage would've bagged us first prize. Really. ... So, it seems, six years down the road, what I remember most vividly about my secondary school days is this madcap adventure that lasted for a few months. Well, to write extensively only about the History Drama would be a grevious injustice to the trove of stories that my drawer of letters and notes tell. I've been extremely blessed to have undergone such an eventful and truly purposeful education (despite the fact that our country seems to be making every effort at every turn to screw up the local education system) so far. Not to mention the people that I've had the fortune of knowing. This small anecdote about the exciting History Drama is just the icing on the cake; the tip of the iceberg. It is a joy just to think about those good old days. So now I have a problem: To have had led such a meaningful life in my secondary school and junior college days only serve to make it harder for my future life in university and beyond to match up to the past; it would be harder for me to 'move on' in life. It was the best time in my life only because the present is not as good as the past. And should my life become more meaningful in university, it would only raise the bar and make my working life and beyond even harder to be as joyful. Surely everyday can't be the best day of my life? And, would I thus wish that I didn't have such a memorable time and education in my impressionable years? Definitely not, for isn't it is better to have loved and lost, than not to have loved at all? Yet what is the point of tasting love if it is temporal, and would probably serve to bring more misery than joy? Surely there's an answer to this difficult question that nostalgia poses? ... Sigh, I am starting to miss school, 2 months after I ORD. ( 9 comment) |
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